Of extreme interest to many in academia is the impact of Western imperialism on former colonies. Exploring the implications of Western hegemony has become a cottage industry. There is a litany of studies examining colonial legacies in the developing world. For instance, distinguished scholars James Robinson and Daron Acemoglu trace underdevelopment in some countries to the institutional legacies of colonialism. History shapes the future, so we should never suggest that examining the effects of Western colonialism is an unworthy goal.

In a macroeconomics-driven world, economic fallacies abound. They are periodically trashed when disproved, only to arise again as received wisdom for a new generation of macroeconomists determined to justify their statist beliefs. The most egregious of these is that inflation can only occur as the handmaiden of economic growth, while deflation is similarly linked to a recession spinning out of control into the maelstrom of a slump.

This error is the opposite of the facts.

Ontario’s ever-changing rent control policies prove that politicians are just as committed to flip-flopping as the Minnesota Vikings are to not winning the Super Bowl.

During a recent interview, Ontario’s Labour minister Monte McNaughton spoke about the rules that businesses will be expected to follow as the economy reopens, and the consequences for businesses that do not obey the government’s rules:

From time to time, Austrian economists, goldbugs, and other economists on the saner end of the spectrum warn of the inflationary dangers of modern central bank policies. The most famous case of this was Bob Murphy’s bet with David Henderson that the Federal Reserve’s policies after the financial crisis of 2008 would result in high, i.e., double digit inflation.

I heard several days ago from my friend Larry Beane that people in Walter Block’s seminar who had been reading Theory and History wondered whether Mises is a moral relativist. As I’ll try to show, the answer depends on what you mean by “moral relativist,” but in the way the term is usually understood in contemporary philosophy, he isn’t. I’d like to dedicate this article to the memory of Leo Beane, an outstanding young man of great character and intelligence who was not a moral relativist.

The Tyranny of Merit: What’s Become of the Common Good? By Michael J. Sandel. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020. 272 pages.

Listen to the Audio Mises Wire version of this article.

According to the modern portfolio theory (MPT), financial asset prices always fully reflect all available and relevant information, and any adjustment to new information is virtually instantaneous. In this way of thinking, asset prices respond only to the unexpected part of any information, since the expected part is already embedded in prices.

According to Marx, a person’s class determines their ideology. The content of their mind reflects the role their class plays in the current stage of history, which is in turn determined by the developmental stage of the means of production. A person’s class ideology provides them with an interpretation of reality that allows them to behave in the interests of their class. Accordingly, ideologies are collective phenomenon. They are not primarily a reflection of a person’s individual thinking, evaluation of information, or experience.